This month’s show will be our Awesome Eighth Anniversary Extravaganza!

And! It will be a bit off schedule. But it will still be awesome.

And! It will be at a different venue. How exciting is that?

Due to scheduling conflicts at our beloved home base, this month’s show will be Saturday April 23rd at 7pm at Crush (located just one block north of SE 14th and Belmont, at 1400 SE Morrison St, Portland, OR 97214).

Please do consider joining us for an absolutely fabulous show! Stay tuned for an invite with all the lineup details!

Viva Offbeat! Yiyiyi!

Hugs and sparkles,

Karissa

Ringleader, Offbeat Belly Dance

P.S. Big love to the amazing Guy Masson of Phoebus Photo for capturing this majestic shot from our March 2016 show 😀

Yes! We’ve got one more glittering, mesmeric Offbeat Belly Dance show for 2015 – and we want you to join us!

Yes, you, Scandalously Charismatic Portlander!
For lo, we have a completely awesome lineup…

Forsooth, we have a wonderfully welcoming venue stocked full of delicious libations and tasty nomz…

Fo shizzle, though, without our hearty crew of beloved and good looking audience members, all our radness will be for (jugger)naught, and you – yes you, dear soul – will miss out on an absolutely fabulous Friday night’s entertainment.

Therefore join us, Sassy Portlander! After all, dig if you will this fantastic lineup:

We are delighted to be joined by three of the four horsemen of Offbeat:

Jasmine Rain!

Zighala Zurah!

And Vee!

And! We are thrilled to feature what is sure to be a dazzling performance by the hypnotic and evocative –

Jewels J Phoenix!

And! We are delighted to bring you the return of the stunningly eclectic, the scandalously graceful, the fantastically wonderful –

Rin Ajna!

We are ecstatic to welcome an amazing collaborative piece featuring work by –

Lúlu Stone! Brittany Stark! And Rin Ajna!

And! We are rapturously gleeful to bring you the return of the shiny and captivating –

Isa Cervantes!

Finally and fabulously, we are so very stoked to bring you the Offbeat Belly Dance debut of the luminescent and enchanting –

Jalilah Bellydance!

And of course the insouciant Karissa will be your humble and loquacious MC 😉

As always, the show is FREE! (such a night for such a bargain!)

As always the show is early! (7 to 9:30 or so!)

As always, the show will be awwwwwwesome! (wooo!)

And as always, Noble Patron of Portland’s Amazing Belly Dance Scene, the night will not be complete without you 😉

We are thrilled to welcome back a fabulous that is beloved of the Offbeat family! Join us and be dazzled by the bewitching radsaucery of:

Gypsy Heart Tribal!

Further!

Revel in the much anticipated return of the mesmerizing and gloriously lovely dancer:

Laura Blake

Furthermore!

Delight in the captivating ninja skillz of another beloved Offbeat veteran and all around riveting performer:

Janelle Jackson!

Further! More!

Delight in the dazzling Offbeat Belly Dance debut of the scintillating, the spectacular, the simply magnificent:

Elena Fowler!

Verily, this is truly a lineup that is not to be missed, noble supporter of the formerly underground now second story arts scene! But lo, charismatic Portlander, the glittering sparkle of the night will be incomplete without you.

Join us for the awesome dancers!

Join us for the delectable beverages and tasty nomz!

Join us for the immersive and welcoming fellowship!

For yes, the show is guaranteed to be a party, but the party don’t start til you walk in, fearless Portlander.

Join us! This Friday! For Offbeat Belly Dance!

Yiyiyi! Viva Offbeat!

Hugs and sparkles,

Karissa
Ringleader, Offbeat Belly Dance

P.S. Our beloved venue, The Analog Cafe & Theatre, is located at 705 SE Hawthorne. Close to the Max (the CL line), on TriMet bus line 14-Hawthorne, and convenient street parking abounds!

I’m Karissa and I’m the founder of Offbeat Belly Dance, which set sail on its merry journey in April, 2008 at the illustrious Green Dragon Bistro and Pub in Portland, Oregon. I wanted to create a show that would stretch boundaries, blow minds, and help make Portland’s belly dance community a bigger, weirder, and even more inclusive space.

Seven years and two venues later, we have found a fabulous new home at the Analog Cafe & Theater (at 720 SE Hawthorne). Offbeat remains a haven of genre-defying, innovative, awesome belly dance by Portland’s spectacular belly dance community, and has a solid following of discerning, scandalously charismatic audience members who like rad stuff.

I am continually amazed and grateful that we get to keep bringing the awesomesauce to the good people of Portland each month. Thank you, Sassy Portlanders, for supporting Offbeat for all these years!

In the ensuing years I’ve had the good fortune to study with many other amazing teachers, including Zighala Zurah, Vee, Severina, Ashley Lopez, Samantha Riggs, Zoe Jakes, Rachel Brice, and more. Our robust and talented dance community makes early 21st century Portland is a wonderful time and place to be a belly dancer, and I’m thrilled to have so many opportunities to study with some of my favorite dance heroes.

Once I began my MC career hosting Offbeat, other opportunities to MC found me, and now I often find myself MCing other awesome belly dance events and charity events in the Portland metro area. This was an unexpected side effect of launching a belly dance show, but it’s great fun and an excellent way to make use of my knack for energetic nattering and my penchant for glitter.

Stay tuned for more dancer bios! Profiles of Vee and Jasmine Rain are coming up next!

Hugs and sparkles,

Karissa
Ringleader, Offbeat Belly Dance

P.S. Full disclosure: I totally wrote the first draft of this bio in the third person, thinking it would lend a sense of professionalism and consistency to the whole dealio, but instead it made me feel like a bad parody of Bono so I redid it in the first person and now I like it way better.

Zighala Zurah is a Turkish American Fusion dancer hailing from Portlandia. She danced and competed in Scottish Highland Dance from ages 4-16, and has studied and loved fourteen other types of dance in the past 20 years.

She performs regularly as one of The Four Horsemen of Offbeat Belly Dance (www.offbeatbellydance.com, and on Facebook!) and throughout the Portland metro area and beyond! She teaches at the Viscount Dance Studios, sharing her love and knowledge of the magical art of belly dance.